2/11/2009 @ 6:00PM

Lincoln's Lost Memorabilia

The Death Quilt

After Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, he was carried across the street to a house owned by William Petersen, a tailor. He died the next morning. Lincoln’s deathbed is owned by the Chicago History Museum. But the quilt on which he died has never been found. In an historical oddity, in 1913, Fred Petersen (William’s son) told The New York Times that Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, an occasional guest in the Petersen house, had, only weeks before, slept under the same quilt that Lincoln died upon.